On the convergence of metric and geometric properties of polyhedral surfaces (Q884773)

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the behavior of some geometric properties of polyhedral surfaces converging to smooth surfaces. More precisely, the authors ask: if a sequence of triangulated polyhedral surfaces in \(R^3\) converges to a smooth surface, under what conditions do metric and geometric properties such as intrinsic distance, area, mean curvature, geodesics, Laplace-Beltrami operators converge too? It is demonstrated that if a sequence of polyhedral surfaces converges to a smooth surface in Hausdorff distance then the following conditions are equivalent: (i) convergence of normal fields, (ii) convergence of metric tensors, (ii) convergence of area, (iv) convergence of Laplace-Beltrami operators. The convergence in (i)--(iv) is viewed in some particular senses; for instance, the Laplace-Beltrami operators are regarded as bounded linear maps of certain Sobolev spaces, the convergence is treated in some appropriate operator norm. Besides, it is shown that if a sequence of polyhedral surfaces converges to a smooth surface in Hausdorff distance together with convergence of their normal fields, then uniform convergence of geodesics on compact sets, convergence of solutions to the Dirichlet problem and convergence of mean curvature vectors hold too. As consequence, if a sequence of polyhedral surfaces, which are minimal in the sense of Pinkall-Polthier, converges to a smooth surface in Hausdorff distance such that their normal fields converge, then the limit smooth surface is minimal in the classical sense. Thus this paper provides a foundation to the modern discretization theory developed recently by Bobenko, Pinkall, Poltier, Hoffmann, Morvan and others.